Simchat Torah

Shalom, well we have almost survived another high holiday season. But before it’s all over there is one more holiday to go, Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah (translation = Torah happiness) is the holiday where we celebrate both the ending and the beginning of the Torah’s yearly cycle. A portion of the Torah is read each Shabbat. When the rabbi’s were deciding how to divide the Torah into Parshot (weekly sections) they organized it so that the Torah would be read, in its entirety, each year.

Simchat Torah (Thursday evening)  is also an amazing, kid friendly holiday. We basically throw a big party in the synagogue to honor the Torah. There is singing, dancing, flag waving, candy apples and lots of fun! 

For Simchat Torah we read the very last parsha in the Torah and the very first. The last line says, "Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses - Whom the Lord singled out face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his courtiers and his whole country, and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel" (Deuteronomy 34:7). This leaves us with the word Israel as the last word of the Torah. Israel in Hebrew ends with the letter Lamed (ל).

The first sentence in the Torah is, "When God began to create heaven and earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, "let there be light"; and there was light " (Genesis 1:1). The first word in Hebrew is Bereshit (In the beginning); Bereshit begins with the Hebrew letter Bet (ב).

So, if you take the last letter of the Torah, the Lamed of Israel and place it next to the first letter of Bereshit, the Bet you have a new word, בל which means heart. One explanation for this is that the words of the Torah are there for us only as words, but they come alive when we add our hearts into the conservation.